We’re all children of the sexual revolution, and we’ve become morally numb because of it, including Christians.
I don’t think even most conservative Christians realize how dulled our moral consciences have become about sex. Yes, we object to obvious evils such as abortion, but we don’t seem to realize how deep the attack on sex and family life goes.
A recent exchange with a brother in Christ reminded me of the problem. He initially reached out with a question about whether homosexuals can be saved, but the conversation quickly branched out into other topics. Here is an edited version of that conversation. He is the questioner (Q), and I am giving the answers (A).
Q: So, you can be gay and saved, but God desires that you change, right?
A. Right. Salvation is by grace, through faith, apart from works (Eph 2:8-9). People with same-sex attraction can believe in Jesus and be saved, just like any other sinner. All sinners are in the same boat, and we can all be saved by simply believing in Jesus.
But yes, God both desires and empowers us to change. “Let us walk with decency, as in the daytime: not in carousing and drunkenness; not in sexual impurity and promiscuity; not in quarreling and jealousy” (Rom 13:13). We ought to walk differently.
Q. It’s a hard pill to swallow because I know some loving gay marriage couples who raise families and do great things…It’s a monogamous relationship.
A. I don’t consider those to be good things. Not really.
Q. Why not?
A. What is marriage? It is the only relationship that binds a man and woman together for life and can result in children who will be raised by both biological parents. No other relationship is like that.
By contrast, same-sex unions (which I don’t consider to be “marriages” at all) rip a child away from his family—from at least one parent and from one set of grandparents, not to mention siblings, cousins, uncles, aunts, and grandparents. I consider that to be fundamentally wrong. Whereas marriages create new families, same-sex unions destroy them.
Q. But this couple did it in a lab, and one of them gave birth to their children.
A. That makes it worse, not better. This is part of why things have gone so deeply wrong. Conceiving a child in a lab means dehumanizing the child by treating her like a product to manufacture—and to discard if she does not meet the specifications of the customer. That is not treating life with reverence or as a person who is valuable in herself.
I can understand using medicine to help a married couple reach their natural potential to conceive, but a same-sex couple has no such potential. It produces a child to tear him or her away from (I’m assuming) her father and her father’s family. To me, that’s profoundly evil.
Q. If someone willingly went to a sperm bank to donate, they knew what they were doing. They have no intention of fathering a child.
A. He had no intention of raising the child but intended to father one. And that’s why it’s so evil. It’s wrong for a man to father a child that he plans to abandon. That means planning to harm his own son or daughter. Sperm banks encourage deadbeat fathers, and they encourage mothers to think that fathers are optional, which means treating marriage and family as disposable. That’s an attack on the good of the family.
Q. So you’re saying what he did, and anyone else who goes to a sperm bank and does, is evil?
A. Yes. Going to a sperm bank is evil. For several reasons. Think of it. It means doing something sexually unclean, effectively committing adultery in your heart, intentionally abandoning your child or children, undermining the family, and doing it all for money. I don’t think people realize how evil all this is because society—what I call the sexual revolution society—is morally numb.
Q. Makes me feel like I’m numb, I guess.
A. Most of us born into this sexual revolution culture are morally numb. We have no idea how corrupt this all is. We don’t even consider these practices wrong because we’ve mostly lost our sense of right and wrong in this area. I’ve had to fight to develop a Christian perspective on these things. Nothing in my secular upbringing—in the movies I’ve seen, music I’ve heard, or in the society around me—has given me the proper perspective on Biblical sexual morality. Not even church! We can touch on very basic issues from the pulpit but don’t explain them, and since most people don’t read up on these issues, they won’t learn about them on their own. We don’t understand how the meaning of the family is tied up with the idea of having a meaningful universe. That God’s purpose for marriage reflects the whole universe having a purpose.
Let me share a deep quote. It contains some big ideas, but it is worth meditating on. Commenting on the Church of England’s recent decision to allow the blessing of same-sex partnerships, Rod Dreher explains it this way:
“Here’s the bottom line: the Christian prohibition on homosexuality (and non-marital sexuality of all kinds) is not a matter of arbitrary line-drawing based on first-century Semitic prohibitions. It is about sacralizing the body, and making it conform to ultimate reality, to the Logos. To give up this view is—whether the people who advocate for it understand or not—to accept, in Taylor’s phrase, the death of the meaningful cosmos. That is, the death of a cosmos in which Christianity is the key to knowing its meaning. What the Church of England is doing with these same-sex blessings is an affirmation of a different cosmos, and a different religion” (see here, emphasis added).
But as much as all of this is sin, there is forgiveness in Christ. When a believer sins, Jesus steps in as our advocate before the Father (1 John 2:1), and His grace abounds over it (Rom 6:1). Even if we tear families apart, God promises to never cast a believer out of His (John 6:37). Maybe the only thing worse than being numb to sin is being numb to God's grace.
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